On 27/09/2013 04:34, leeoliveshackelf...@surewest.net wrote: > Good afternoon, dear FreeBSD enthusiast. I have installed X11 and Gnome on > my computer equipped with FreeBSD 9.1. The X11 > and Gnome packages were taken from the d.v.d.-r.o.m. that > contained the operating system. The computer is an H.P. Z220 > with an Intel Xeon quad-core processor. I do not want Gnome > to start automatically on bootup. I wish to call it from the > command line on the local console. When I have finished > working with Gnome, I expect the operating system to return me > to console session from which Gnome was called. I have > started Gnome with the command "exec gdm-session". I do not > know if the "exec" keyword is necessary, but it worked. When I > am finished working with Gnome, I click on the logoff (or > logout?) button. The screen turns solid green with none of > icons, characters, image, or splash. The computer does not > respond to the keyboard. When I cut the power to the computer, > and then reboot, I receive a sequence of messages complaining > that ada0s3a, ada0s3d, and so on, are corrupt, and that I must > run fdsk. What am I doing wrong here? The following error messages, which > are shown only partially because they flash quickly on the screen, appear > before Gnome starts:
There's a number of things: -- you seem to be logging into your X environment as root. This is not a particularly good idea. Much better to create yourself a normal user account for that, and use su(1) or sudo(1) to take rootly powers as required. -- You don't say what sort of graphics card the system has. If you look at /var/log/Xorg.log.0 (or something similar to that) it will have that information amongst a lot of other stuff. The nature of the graphics card is important, because some models don't switch back to console mode from graphics mode very well. It's a known bug, and unfortunately if you have one of those models the best advice at the moment is to run a display manager (xdm, kdm, slim) and always use a graphical login. -- The use of 'exec' in ~/.startx is correct, but not if you're typing that from the shell command prompt. What exec does is *replace* the current process with the one you called. That's fine if you're replacing the (very small) shell script that is ~/.startx, but not if you're replacing your login shell. The recommended way to start X from the command line is to set up a ~/.startx script (which could contain just your 'exec gdm-session' command, or quite a bit more. Then type startx to (like it says on the tin...) start X. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey
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